Archive

Just managed to finish watching some films that I recorded ages ago on my MythTV box. All I can say is thank good for bookmarks, and MythFrontend on my Mac Mini.

Anyway, watched the last part of “The Girl Next Door”, which was OK, but not wasn’t the most thrilling film I’ve watched.

Then finished watching (well, the majority, really) of “The Transporter” – good god that’s a brilliant film! What I loved about it was the dark broody music in the fight scenes – none of this high BPM, “high octane” music you get in other “fight” films – the music was just spot on. I’m thinking that I might need to rent “The Transporter 2” just to see what that is like now!

At little while ago, around near where I work, I noticed seeing some road shigns that had red triangles stuck to the signs. The triangles looked like isoceles triangles that had been divided in half vertically (making a right-angled triangle).

The top point of the triangle pointed to along the direction of the road sign (or at the many roundabouts in the area, pointed in one direction on the roundabout). When you look at the triangles, it is fairly obvious that they are pointing somewhere, and are supposed to be followed.

I assume that they are there for one particular group of people who would understand their significance. It’s a bit odd though, because they definitely aren’t official indicators, so I’m not entirely sure who they could be for.

One day, I’m going to follow them to find out where the lead. Once I have worked that out, I might try back-tracking them to find out where they came from!

It’s not the only sign of this sort in the area. If you are heading west-bound on the A27, and come up to the junction with the A23, and head north. If you look at several of the signs, in the very bottom right hand corner, there is a very definite arrow (it used to be flourescent orange, but is now somewhat faded) pointing up the A23 towards London. Never worked out who that was for!

The other week, I discovered “the other arrow” that I knew that I had seen, and couldn’t remember where. Couple of days later, I was driving the same route, only going much further, and kept seeing them. Realised that both sets are linked and that they are the same trail. I’m guessing that the trail is now so far probably over 15 miles long!

Having not really used it before, I’ve decided that the expedia.co.uk website is absolute shit.

It really, really is.

Ever link is a javascript link, meaning that I can’t open the link in a new tab in Firefox. Secondly, I bookmarked a hotel that I wanted to keep on file, except that I can’t load the bookmark because expedia store information that isn’t loaded into the bookmark. This wouldn’t be so bad, if I could at least save the information that I found – but I can’t because the site doesn’t give me that information.

So, I can’t look at more than one hotel at a time, I can’t remember the hotels that I wanted to remember, and I can’t bookmark anything.

Absolute shit. Talk about usability problems.

This reminds me about one of the hints that I saw on the W3 validator site – it just said Don’t Break the Back Button.Shame their site designers never saw that.

It’s becoming a nasty quagmire of stupid posts. When I first started watching it, it was full of links to useful, well written technical posts. Now it’s just white noise.

A little while ago every other post seemed to contain the name “Obama“, which is incredibly annoying for people who don’t live in the U.S., so I spent ages voting all these posts down – fortunately, this appears to have worked – but if, like me, you use the RSS feed, and don’t visit the website, it’s pain to have to do this all the time.

Now, all it contains are links to pictures, movies, and posts which have insanely long, essay like, titles that I just cannot be arsed to read.

What is incredibly annoying is that everyone disagrees with each other over whether these things are good or not – exactly what the up-down voting is aimed to solve, but still they appear.

What’s also really annoying is the short amount of time that you remained logged in for – I am always having to log back in, because my RSS feed fails to parse because I’ve been logged out, and I received an HTML error, instead of RSS.

Yesterday, whilst surfing t’interweb in my lunch break, I came across “MythWebRSS” which is an extension for MythWeb (from the MythTV package), which provides you with an RSS feed with information regarding the last set of recorded programmes on your MythTV backend.

Tonight, I’ve tried to install it, only to discover that I had previously attempted to install it, but had given up because I couldn’t get it to work. I have also discovered how to fix that problem. Here’s how…

The problem that I had stated the “db_*” environment variables in the .htaccess file were not set. I dutifully checked that they were, read the README file again, check the instructions in there, checked that mod_dav and mod_env were running, added the <directory> directive in my Apache config file just to make sure and the damn thing still didn’t work.

I eventually came back to the .htaccess file for the /mythweb/ directory. I then realised that it was only set to work on files that matched “mythweb.*” (i.e. “mythweb.php” and “mythweb.pl”).

Looking at the Apache core features description for the <files> directive, I then changed the line from:

<files “mythweb.*”>

to say:

<files ~ “(mythweb.*|rss.php)”>

(Note that the “~” character is needed to ensure that the match is done using a regular expression).

This seems to have fixed this problem, but I am now left with another one. When you check the RSS feed, the correct information is output, but it is preceded with the line “<hr><p><b>Error</b> at /var/www/html/mythweb/includes/css.php, line 34:<br />Invalid argument supplied for foreach()</p>”.

This one is obviously a coding problem (probably due to the fact that I am running MythTV v0.20.1, and it is designed for v0.19.0). I’ll keep working on the issue though.

I’ve also come up with some ideas for some other extensions that I think that I could possibly write as well. It’s all to do with DVB Radio and PodCasting!